Since April Fools Day has come and gone, I think I should provide some clarification. We’ve had people ask whether or not Misery Tourism Games  is an April Fools joke, and if we seriously plan to continue to update this site in the future.

Let me address this piece by piece:

Is this a hoax?

No. Misery Tourism Games is real. All of the games posted on this site are real. They are all complete, playable games. They are alpha drafts with awful production values, and they will definitely be revised based on the feedback that we received, but they are real games. All of them have been playtested at least a few times, and we’ve tried to remove all of the glaring bugs.

Why launch the site on April Fools Day then?

For two reasons really:

First, we just happened to get all of the bits and pieces of the site together now. Rudy and I were watching the miserytourism.com domain for several months. We knew the domain was expiring, and were waiting for it to become available. This finally happened around March 20. Then we had to decide which of our big pile of work-in-progress games we wanted to have available a launch, edit and format those games to make them as readable and playable as possible, and finish tweaking the WordPress template. By the time all of this was done, it was March 28th or 29th. So we would have opened the site sometime during the first week of April regardless. (Although if we didn’t decide to shoot for April 1st, we probably would have waited until we could get a logo design done.)

Second, we knew some people were going to react to the site with incredulity anyway, so we figured if they were going to say “Is this a joke?” anyway, we might as well give them the opportunity to be serious about it. We also thought that a discussion about whether or not the site was a hoax might lead some people who would dismiss it outright to look a little closer at our games, even if only to finds clues that it was all a prank. Was this dishonest? Maybe, but still more honest than a lot of what you’ll read on April 1st.

It turns out that the reception has been much more positive than we expected, so maybe this was a mistake. Maybe we should have waited a few days and prevented the confusion. I’m definitely open to have that discussion in the comments, if anyone wants to press the point.

So what now?

Now we work on making this site, and our games, bigger and better. Rudy and I plan to regularly release new games, along with revisions, updates and bonus content for existing games. We’re debating exactly how regularly now. We want to be sure that we keep this site alive and keep the new stuff coming often without risking burnout. Except a post about this topic soon.

In the meantime, we are looking for feedback! If you like any of our games enough to play it, please take a minute or two to send us a brief (or extensive) email about your experience. Let us know what you did and didn’t like and any suggestions you may have.

In addition to our email address, you can get in touch with us through twitter, facebook and Google+. Or you can leave your thoughts on our posts and games directly using the comments section.